After soaring to the top of the Apple App Store charts in the US, DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence assistant is now limiting new user registration. According to the incident report, registration is temporarily restricted “due to large-scale malicious attacks on DeepSeek services,” although it is unclear how these restrictions are being applied.
“Existing users can log in as usual,” DeepSeek said in a statement. “Thank you for your understanding and support.” A warning banner on the registration page of DeepSeek’s website states that “registration may take time” rather than being completely banned, and urges users to wait and “try again” if their application is unsuccessful.
Earlier today, DeepSeek reported outages and performance issues that prevented users from logging in or creating new accounts. This incident is currently marked as resolved, but no information was provided about attacks on the DeepSeek chatbot. It was previously thought that DeepSeek’s systems might be overloaded due to the huge influx of new users downloading the app, which is said to compete with Western AI services such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropics Claude.
An earlier update said that “only registration with a mobile phone number in mainland China is currently supported” to “ensure uninterrupted service.” The specific requirement for Chinese numbers has been removed, but I and other Verge staffers have been able to successfully create new accounts using the Google and Apple ID login options. Email registration is also still available on the DeepSeek registration page.
